Table XIII

The dependence of copyhold upon manorial custom offers an explanation of the fact that the changes of the sixteenth century displaced copyholders, although the courts would intervene when a custom which gave them security was proved to exist. The most important questions with regard to the custom which determined the copyholders' position were two: first, whether he had by it an estate of inheritance, or merely an estate for years, for life, or for lives; second, whether his payments were fixed or unalterable, or whether they could be increased at the will of the lord. If it was not an estate of inheritance his holding returned fairly frequently into the hands of the manorial authorities, who could either renew it on the old terms, or lease it at an increased rent, or amalgamate it with a large farm. In the second case, where payments were variable, lords could force a tenant to throw up his land by placing a prohibitive burden upon it. The only way of ascertaining with accuracy the real position of copyholders in our period would be to show the relative proportions in which these four arrangements are found upon each of many hundred manors. And this we cannot yet do. The figures published by Dr. Savine[524]suggest that manors on which copyholders possessed an estate of inheritance, and those where they did not, were about equal in number, while manors on which the fines were uncertain predominated over those on which they were fixed in a proportion of more than two to one. Since it would seem that the ability of the lord to demand what fine he pleased could be used as a means of excluding a successor evenwhen the copy was not merely for life or lives but from father to son, his investigations suggest that the copyholders' tenure was more often insecure than not.

To the examples which he has collected one may perhaps add certain others, inadequate though they are in point of quantity. Taking twenty-one[525]manors in the years 1568–1573, of which three are in Somersetshire, one in Devonshire, and seventeen in Wiltshire, one finds that on only one out of the whole number was the copyholders' estate one of inheritance. On one manor copies were granted for four lives or less—it is expressly stated that they are not to be granted for more—and on nineteen they are granted for three lives or less. On one manor (that where the copyholders had estates of inheritance) the fine was fixed by custom at a sum which is not stated, but which could not be increased. On the remaining twenty the fine was a variable one, the general formula being that land shall be given “for such fines as buyers can fix by bargaining with the lord or his officers, both in possession and in reversion,” which means that they were to be fixed by the higgling of the market. Turning next to two manors on the Welsh[526]Border, which were in possession of the Crown, one is told that in the reign of Elizabeth the royal officers granted the tenants leases for years, renewable at the will of the tenant, and fixed the fine at two years' rent, thus giving them what was virtually an estate of inheritance. It is possible, however, that the Crown tenants received morefavourable treatment than did those on manors which were in private hands. From Northumberland, again, there is a good deal of evidence which it is difficult to summarise. Coke stated that “the customary tenants upon the borders of Scotland ... are mere tenants at will, and though they keep their customs inviolate, yet the lord might, sans controll, evict them.”[527]At the beginning of the seventeenth century an order in Chancery ruled that none of the tenants of Lady Cumberland,[528]who paid a fine on the death of lord and tenant, could have an estate of inheritance; and we have clear evidence that the fines paid by the copyhold tenants of the Earl of Northumberland[529]increased very considerably in the course of the sixteenth century. On the other hand such insecurity was not universal. A common rule on the Northumbrian border seems to have given a copyhold for life, with a tenant right of renewal to the heir, provided that a constant custom of renewal could be proved.[530]On the Crown estates in the reign of Elizabeth fines were fixed on conditions which varied from place to place; sometimes they were at discretion, sometimes one year’s rent, sometimes two years' rent; and in 1609 the tenants of twelve Tynemouthshire manors got the Courts to confirm a custom limiting their fine to a definite sum, on six of them to £2 on the admission of a descendant, and £4 on alienation, and on the remaining six to one year's rent in the former case and two years' rent in the latter.[531]On eleven out of thirteen manors in Norfolk[532]and Suffolk the fines are uncertain; on one,Wighton, they are said to have been fixed at 4s. per acre “by the space of 100 years at least"; on one, Aldeburgh, there is a curious distinction between the fines paid for land “in the fields," which are at the will of the lord, and the fines paid for cottage tenements, which are fixed at 2s. when the site is built upon and 1s. when the site is not covered. Elsewhere when the fine is fixed the ordinary payment seems to be usually two years' rent on descent, with sometimes a small addition, sometimes a small deduction, when the tenement is alienated during the tenant’s life. Estates of inheritance and fixed fines do not necessarily go together. The general situation on the small number of manors for which information has been obtained is set out below.[533]Table I relates to duration of tenancies, Table II to the character of admission fines. In each table, line (a) gives Dr. Savine’s figures, line (b) our own, line (c) the total of both together.

Manors.Copyholds of Inheritance.Copyholds for Years but with Right of Renewal (i.e.virtually Copyholds of Inheritance).Copyholds for Life or Lives.Copyholds for Years but without Right of Renewal (i.e.virtually Leases for Years)(a) 82251740...(b) 60222333(c) 1424719733

Manors.Fines Certain.Fiines Uncertain.Partly Certain and Partly Uncertain.(a) 862858...(b) 6125351(c) 14753931

It will be seen that the degree of security enjoyed by copyholders varies very greatly. When the copyhold is one of inheritance, it is legally complete, unless the tenants incur forfeiture by breaking the custom. An estate for life with right of renewal is virtually as good as a copyhold of inheritance. Estates for life or lives are precarious. Copyholds for years without right of renewal are scarcely distinguishable from leases. On the whole, when these examples are added to those of Dr. Savine, it would appear that copyholds for life or lives were more usual than copyholds of inheritance, while fixed fines were the exception and variable fines the general rule.

The importance of the predominance of copyholds for lives for the question of the degree of security enjoyed by the tenant is shown by the efforts which were made by lords of manors, where copyholders had estates of inheritance, to persuade them to give up their copies and take leases instead. It is evident that in this course they encountered a good deal of opposition. On manors, however, where the copyholds escheated to the lord at intervals of one, two, or three lives, he could substitute leases for a regrant of the copies, or throw the holdings into a large farm, or retain them in his own hands. Though such action might be thought harsh, it could hardly be prevented by the tenants, since the lord could always hold the threat of eviction over their heads. One finds some manors where the striking and exceptional preponderance of small leaseholders suggests unmistakably that such a conversion of copyhold to leasehold has taken place,[534]or where the motive of the alteration is shown by the great rise in rents which has followed it. One finds others where the struggle between copyhold and leasehold is going on and is still undecided. In that struggle the chances are against the copyholders, even though their interest is protected by the law, for the law is less powerful than ignorance and fear. How can our peasants, men “very simple and ignorant of their estates,”[535]enter into the respective merits of copies and leases with the powers of the manor, armed with professional advice and all those indefinite but invincible advantages in bargaining which are given by legal knowledge, social influence, and a long tradition of authority? It is so easy to get caught in some legal trap. In the reign of Charles I., the two hundred Crown tenants of the manor of North Wheatley, who have suffered much in the way of rack-renting from the officers of their impecunious lord, engage a lawyer to negotiate the renewal of their leases of the demesne lands. The grant is made to him, as their attorney; but, to their dismay, they find that he declines to fulfil his bargain. He has “afterward, contrary to the Trust committed to him, increased and raised the rent thereof upon the tenants, to his owne privat benefitt.”[536]The tenants of Hewlington succeed, as we have seen, in inducing the Crown to recognise their estates of inheritance by granting that their forty years' leases shall be renewable at the will of the tenants. Then unexpectedly a servant of the Earl of Leicester purchases one of the townships. The tenants, in an agony of apprehension, “perceiving that they were like to have their said landes and tenements after the expiration of their said leases taken from them, and that they had no remedy by the course of the common law to helpe themselves, preferred their Bill to be relieved in Equitie.” Chancery comes to their rescue. It decides that the covenant made by the Crown to the effect that their leases should berenewable at the option of the holder is binding not only on the Crown, but on all to whom it might sell the lands in question. But their troubles are not yet finished. It is one thing to get a judgment, another for the judgment to be carried out. The purchaser is servant to a great man and can afford to be dilatory and recalcitrant. We leave these villagers still petitioning “His Highness and His Honourable Council and Commissioners of Revenue that when it shall seem good unto them the said tenants may be admitted to have their leases accordingly.”

It is so easy to be intimidated by the fear of aggravating your misfortunes. When an agent frightens some tenants by telling them the unfavourable decision of the Court of Chancery as to the tenant right of the copyholders on a neighbouring estate, do they answer, as they should, that manorial customs vary, and that they will see what the Courts say about their own? No, they make “Humble suit that your lordship will be pleased to grant them leases for twenty-one years, and they will pay, in lieu of their fine, double rent for every farm.”[537]Sometimes they live to repent their bargain. “I have persuaded one John Wilson of Over-Buston,” writes a manorial official to the Earl of Northumberland, “to deliver me in his copy, and he is content to take a lease at double rent.”[538]A strange chance has left us a letter, in which this very John Wilson, labouring horribly amid the intricacies of grammar, expounds through one long, broken-backed sentence, what balm such “contentment” brings. “To the Right Honourable the Earl of Northumberland, the humble petition of John Wilson, his wife and 8 poor children. Humbly complaining showeth ... your petitioner ... that whereas your said petitioner and his predecessors being ancient tenants to your honour, holding one tenement on ferme in Upper Bustone, by virtue of copyhold tenure out of the memory of man, which copies both of your said poor petitioners' great grandfather, his father’s father, and his own father are yet extant to be seen: andnow of late your said poor petitioner, being under age, helpless and none to do for him, and forced (God knows) by some of your honour’s officers to take a lease and pay double and treble rent, in so much that your said poor petitioner, his wife, and 8 poor children is utterly now beggared and overthrown, unless your worthy good honour will be pleased to take a pitiful communication thereof, or otherwise your saide poore petitioner, his wife and poore children knows no other way but of force to give over your honour’s land, by reason of the deare renting thereof, and so be constrained to go a-begging up and down the countrie.”[539]Poor, patient, stiff-fingered John Wilson, so certain that he has not been treated fairly, so confident that his lordship cannot have meant him to be wronged, so easily circumvented by his lordship’s brisk officials! He and his heavy kind are slow to move; but, once roused, they will not easily be persuaded to go back. It was such as he that, at one time or another in the sixteenth century, set half the English counties ablaze with the grievances of the tillers of the soil.

The significance of the predominance of variable fines is very evident if one turns to examine the economic relations between lords and copyhold tenants as they stood in the middle of the sixteenth century. A manor on which there was a large number of customary tenants must have often seemed from the point of the owner a rather disappointing form of property, because the first fruits of economic progress tended to pass into the hands of the tenants. The rents and services due from their holdings were fixed by custom; meanwhile prices were rising with the fall in the value of silver, and the result, as is pointed out by Maitland, was that the economic rent or unearned increment of their properties was intercepted by the copyholders, instead of being drained, as under leasehold, into the pocket of the lord.

An explanation of what is meant can best be given by recurring to the table of rents printed in Chapter III. of Part I. It will be recollected that on the manors there represented the value of the rents got by the lords from thecustomary tenants was often almost stationary. When the enormous fall in the purchasing power of money is remembered, it is clear that rentals must sometimes have very greatly depreciated, which of course meant that the tenants retained the surplus due to economic progress, a surplus measured by the difference between the “rents of assize" and the full rack-rent for which the holding could be let if put up to competition, and amounting sometimes to more than three-quarters of the latter. At Wilburton, for example (to quote a fresh instance), according to Maitland,[540]a virgate worth £7 or £8 only pays £1 in rent. From the competitive rents of the open market the lord was debarred by the custom of the manor. How could he tap the surplus? He did so, it may be suggested, either by inducing the tenants to exchange their copies for leases, or by raising the fines, when the fines were not fixed by custom, so as to get in a lump sum what he could not get by yearly instalments. In that case the tenant’s surplus was on paper only; he was exactly in the position of an investor in a stock of inflated value, the high nominal interest of which has been capitalised in the price paid for the shares. The probability that when fines were movable, they were forced up in the sixteenth century so as to sweep away any unearned increment accruing to the holders of customary land, is not only suggested by the bitter denunciations launched against the practice by contemporaries. It is also indicated by the manorial documents. May not this be the explanation of what Maitland justly calls “the absurdly high price" of £1261 paid in the reign of James I. by the purchasers of Wilburton, a manor the yearly value of which was at the time only £33? The suggestion is confirmed, as far as a few manors are concerned, by the upward movement of fines revealed by the following table—

1567.1585.Acklington£57, 3s. 8d. or £3, 3s. 4d.£87, 10s. 0d. or £4, 17s. 2d.per tenant.per tenant.High Buston£11, 14s. 0d. or £2, 18s. 6d.£18, 0s. 0d. or £4, 10s. 0d.per tenant.per tenant.Birling£43, 7s. 6d. or £4, 6s. 9d.£72, 0s. 0d. or £7, 4s. 0d.per tenant.per tenant.

1520–39, average fine per acre for each of 42 tenants . . . 1s. 3d.1540–39, " " " " " " " 28 " . . . 2s. 11d.1550–59, " " " " " " " 36 " . . . 5s. 6d.1560–69, " " " " " " " 36 " . . . 11s. 0d.

The figures show a steady upward movement during the third and fourth decades of the century of a little over 100 per cent., a rather less rapid rise between 1549 and 1559, and another rise of 100 per cent. between 1559 and 1569. They are of course too small to be the basis of a wide generalisation, but perhaps they may be held to offer some documentary confirmation of a grievance which bulks large in the literature of the period. The elasticity of fines at any rate corrects the impression which would be formed of the tenants' position from looking only at the comparatively stationary rents. The same tendency is suggested by the details of individual copies. It was a not uncommon practice for a tenant who was in possession and had an estate for life to buy at a later date the right of his heir to succeed him. When this was done we have an opportunity of comparing the fines paid at different periods, and the complaints of contemporaries about unreasonable and excessive fines become intelligible. This may be illustrated by a few extreme instances taken from the manors of Estoverton and Donnington in Wiltshire, and of South Brent in Somersetshire.

Fine for Copy.Fine for Reversion.1.6/8(1537)£5(1563)2.40/—"£13, 6s. 8d.(1566)3.54/4"£23(1561)4.60/—"£30(1565)5.20/—"£10(1561)6.20/—(1529)£40(1563)7.33/4(1542)£20(1565)8.66/8(1522)£20(1563)9.13/4(1516)£13, 6s. 8d.(1563)10.40/—(1513)£40(1565)11.46/8(1531)£20(1563)12.6/8(1545)£20(1565)13.£5, 6s. 8d.(1545)£20(1558)14.£9(1532)£12(1557)

Though these are extreme cases, a considerable rise isthe rule and not the exception. The advantage of the fixed rent is in fact neutralised by the movable fine. Such figures give point to Crowley’s outbursts, “They take our houses over our heads; they buye our groundes out of handes, they reyse our rents, they levy great, yea unreasonable fines.”[543]It is not surprising that the programme[544]of agrarian reform put forward by the Yorkshire insurgents in 1536, and by the rebels under Ket in 1549, should have contained a demand for copyhold lands “to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable sum of money.” It is not surprising that the Court of Chancery[545]should have been bombarded with petitions to declare or enforce customs limiting the demands which a lord might make of an incoming tenant. It is perhaps more surprising that, in those cases where the fine was by custom uncertain, the rule that a reasonable fine was about two years' rent should not have been enforced by judges at an earlier date and more generally than it seems to have been. For in the sixteenth century, though many old economic ideas are going by the board, public opinion still clings to the conception that there is a standard of fairness in economic dealings which exists independently of the impersonal movements of the market, which honest men can discover, if they please, and which it is a matter of conscience for public authorities to enforce. Even a good Protestant who hates the Pope will admit that there is more than a little in the Canon Law prohibition of usury,[546]and under usury, be it noted, the plain man includes rack-rents, as well as interest on capital and exorbitant prices.If to a modern economist the demand for reasonable fines and rents savours of sentimentality and confusion, he must logically condemn not only the peasants and their champions, but the statesmen; not only Ket and Hales and More and Latimer, but almost every member of every Elizabethan Privy Council. After all, all the precedents are on the side of an attempt to enforce a standard which shall be independent of the result which might be reached by higgling between this landlord and that tenant. Prices are fixed, wages are fixed, the rate of interest is fixed, though the money market is becoming more and more elusive, more and more critical of old-fashioned attempts at interference; the fines which freeholders must pay on admission have been fixed for centuries. Now that copyhold has got the protection of the Courts, it is not unnatural that tenants should ask the State to do with regard to the bargain most affecting them what it already does for bargains of nearly every other kind. It is not unnatural that, even when the fine is not settled by custom at a definite sum, they should demand nevertheless that the Courts should sanction that establishment of a “common rule," which is the ideal of the economically weak in all ages.

Yet we shall miss the full significance of the movement which we have examined, if we take their demands without analysis, and do not look at the other side of the picture. There was much to be said on the side of the manorial authorities, harsh as they often were. The criticism which Norden,[547]with a surveyor’s experience, makes upon the outcry against the upward movement of fines, by pointing out that the whole scale of prices and payments has been shifted by the depreciation in the value of money, is perfectly justified. For money had depreciated, depreciated enormously;and landlords, who were faced with swiftly rising prices on the one hand and fixed freehold and copyhold rents on the other, were in a cleft stick from which it is not easy to blame them for extricating themselves as best they could. The truth is that if we content ourselves with the supposition of an access of exceptional unscrupulousness on the part of lords of manors which was favoured by contemporaries, we shall misread the situation. The real facts were much more complex, much more serious, much more interesting. A large impersonal cause, the flooding of Europe with American silver, upsets all traditional standards of payment. The first brunt is borne by those whose incomes are fixed, or relatively fixed, the owners of landed property, and the wage-earning classes. But all over the country thousands of new bargains are being struck as leases fall in and copies are renewed. Each fresh contract is the opportunity for a readjustment of relationships, for shifting the burden from the shoulders where it rested. The wage-earners do this to some extent, but not successfully; wages do not keep pace with prices. The landlords do it much more effectively. But there is no mechanical means of measuring what change is necessary in order to place them and their tenants in the same position relatively to each other as they were before. Once customary fines are thrown overboard, there is, unless the Government interferes, no other standard except the full fine which can be got in the open market, and, when the custom of the manor allows it to be demanded, it is demanded. Thus the readjustment, as it were, overshoots itself, and the economic rent, unearned increment, surplus value—it is difficult to avoid phrases which modern associations have made trite—only part of which represents the rise in the price of land caused by the fall in the value of money, tends, instead of being, as hitherto, shared between landlord and copyholder, to be transferreden blocto the former. It is rarely in modern society that classes are sufficiently definite and self-contained, rarely that economic changes are sufficiently catastrophic, for a great shifting of income from one to the other to be detected. Here we can see it going on before our eyes. We can note the result. But in thismatter the twentieth century is not in a position to be critical of the sixteenth.

We may now sum up this part of our subject. The extreme lucrativeness of sheep-farming, and the depreciation in the value of money, offered an incentive to landlords to make the most profitable use which they could of their property by amalgamating small holdings into large leasehold farms, which were used mainly, though not entirely, for pasture. To carry out this new policy they had to get rid of the small tenants. When the tenants held at will, or were lessees for a short term of years, lords could do this without difficulty. When they were copyholders for one life or more, they could do it more slowly; but still they could do it in time. When they were copyholders with an estate of inheritance, lords had only two alternatives—to induce them to accept leases, or to raise the fines for admission. The latter course enabled them to offer the tenants the alternative of surrendering their holdings or paying the full competitive price which could be got for them. And thus it caused an almost revolutionary deterioration in their position. Hitherto the custom of the manor had been a dyke which protected them against the downward pressure of competition, and behind which they built up their prosperity. Now the unearned increment was transferred from tenant to landlord by the simple process of capitalising it in the fine demanded on entry. The interest of the customary tenant, therefore, virtually depreciated to the level of that of a leaseholder. The interest of the manorial lord appreciated to the full and effective ownership of all surpluses arising between the grant of one copy and the grant of the next. Thus the differences in the degree of security enjoyed by copyholders are to be explained by differences in manorial customs. Whom custom helps the law helps; who by custom are without protection, are without protection from the law, except in so far as it gradually builds up a doctrine as to what is reasonable. Long after villeinage has disappeared, copyholders still bear traces of having sprung from a class of whom the law was reluctant to take cognizance, traces of being nurtured in a “villein nest.”[Next Chapter]

[491]Roxburghe Club,Surveys of Pembroke Manors.

[492]Ibid.

[493]Leadam,English Hist. Rev., vol. viii. pp. 684–696.

[494]Ibid., Paynton, Stooke Trister and Cucklington, Donyett, Chedseye, South Brent and Huish. The leases at South Brent are for ninety-two years.

[495]They are Duston in 1561 (R.O. Rentals and Surreys, Portf. 13, No. 23), and Paulspurie in 1541 (ibid., vol. ccccxix., fol. 3).

[496]See pp.204and210.

[497]MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of Survey of Lordship of Bromfield and Gale in Wrexham Free Library.

[498]Selden Society,Select Cases in the Court of Requests.

[499]Fitzherbert,Book of Surveying, p. 32.

[500]For reference, see p.130, note 253.

[501]Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., survey of Mudford and Hinton.

[502]In the following section on copyholders I have been guided largely by Dr. Savine’s article in theQuarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xix.

[503]Fitzherbert,Book of Surveying, p. 28.

[504]Kitchin,Court Leet.

[505]Coke,The Complete Copyholder.

[506]Leadam,Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. vi.

[507]Vinogradoff,Villainage in England, pp. 48–56.

[508]Ashley,Economic History, Part I., vol. ii. pp. 274–282.

[509]Coke upon Littleton, 60 b.

[510]Coke,The Complete Copyholder.

[511]Note-book of Bracton pl., 1237: “Dominus rex non vult se de eisintromittere" (quoted Vinogradoff,Villainage in England, p. 46, note 2).

[512]On this point seeEnglish Hist. Review, vol. viii. p. 296.

[513]Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i. The surveyor is Humberstone.

[514]Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery in the Reign of Ed. VI., vol. i. p. cxxxvii.: “To the Right Honourable Sir Richard Riche, Kt., Lord Riche and Lord Chancellor of England. In humble wise sheweth and complaineth unto your lordeshippe your daley orator Richard Cullyer of Wymondham ... yeoman, and John Cullyer his son,” that whereas they “were admitted tenants (of 20 acres) to hold the same to them and their heirs ... and contynued seased of the said 20 acres as of fee, as tenants at will, by copy of Court Roll" now “Thomas Knyvett, Esq. ... of late claimed 10 acres of the said 20 acres to be the demeanes of the said manor.” Knyvett (i.) answers, “The said lond ys and have been tyme out of mynde parcell of the demeanes of the moytie of the said manor of Cromwell." (ii.) Denies that “the premises have been used to be dymytted or be dymittable by copie of Court Roll for term of lyfe or lyves as in fee"; on the contrary “yt may appear that the same have been letten by term of yeres.”

[515]In 1548 an Act was passed “for the assurance to the tenants of graunts and leases made for the Duke of Somerset’s demesne lands.” It begins, “Whereas of truth noe custom or usage can or maye by the lawes of this realm be annexed or knytt to any meases, lands, tenements, or hereditaments letten by copye of Court Roll ... albeyt those words 'secundum consuetudinem manerii,' be rehearsed and expressed in the saide Court Rolle or coppie had or made, except that the same meases, lands, tenements, or other hereditaments, so letten be of olde customarie or coppieholde land, and have byn used by all the tyme whereof memory of man is not to the contrary to be letten or demysed by copie of court roll."

[516]See pp.122–123.

[517]Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 3218, p. 74. Inquisition of February 20, 1308.

[518]Northumberland County History, vol. v. p. 282.

[519]Crondal Records(Baigent), Part I. p. 177.

[520]Northumberland County History, vol. viii.

[521]Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xiii. pp. 91–92, 1581. The justices are to decide “if they thinke it agreeable with equite and justice that the poore man should be put in possession of the said landes."

[522]Croke’sReports, vol. iii., Trin. 4 Caroli, Rot. dcciv. case 7. Custom that copyholder for life may cut down trees pronounced “a void and unreasonable custom and not allowable by law. For it is the destruction of the inheritance and against the nature of a copyholder for life. But peradventure there may be such a custom for a copyholder of inheritance."

[523]Ibid., vol. iii., p. 198, case 8, Hill, 5 Car., Rot. 125: “The question was whether a lord of a mannor may assess two years and a half value of copyhold land according to racked rent for a fine upon surrender and admittance, and for non-payment enter for forfeiture. And all the Court conceived that one year and a half of rent improved is high enough; and the defendant assessing two years and a half it is unreasonable, and therefore the plaintiff might well refuse the payment thereof."Ibid., vol. i. p. 779, case 13, takes the rule that unreasonable fines need not be paid back to 1600 ("It was holdenper curiamthat if the lord demands an unreasonable fine of his coppyholder where the fine is uncertain, if he denies it, it is not any forfeiture of his copyhold"), but his judgment does not say how many years' rent is a reasonable fine. TheCalendar of Chancery Proceedings, temp.Eliz., is full of petitions from tenants asking the court to declare fines excessive. The rule that a fine must not exceed two years' rent does not appear to have been accepted as binding till 1781 (Grant v. Ashe, Douglas Reports, 722–723). But it is plain from the cases cited above that by 1600 it was recognised that some fines were unreasonable, and by 1630 that a reasonable fine should not exceed one and a half years' rent. The fact that the Chancery intervened to protect the equitable interests of copyholders earlier than the Common Law Courts leads one to suspect that there must be earlier cases than these of the Courts declaring fines unreasonable. But I have not found them.

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